Most of the time they used condoms, but every once in a while Jimmy would forget and they couldn’t turn off their sex drives. One day he didn’t pull out in time, and that was how she’d conceived.
Telling her parents had been the most difficult thing she’d ever been faced with, before or since. They had such high hopes for her. She was going to be the first in her family to go to college. She wouldn’t have to work at menial jobs, like stacking boxes on a forklift in a warehouse or cleaning up behind folks at a downtown hotel. Even with her being co-captain of the cheerleading squad—Susan Bennett was captain—and all the practice it entailed, she managed to keep her grades up.
Her parents were horrified at the news, as Grace had expected them to be. Lou and Helen Corrigan arranged to meet with Janie Lucas, who even back then could best be described as washed-out.
Janie, who had four children by three different men, lit a cigarette and stated in a tired tone, “I always told my son not to sleep with anybody he wouldn’t marry.”
For Jimmy that was the kiss of death. His mother had practically come out and said that if Lou Corrigan insisted her son do right by his daughter, she would have no objections. Her next words made her intention clear as just-washed windows: “I can’t complain about having one less mouth to feed.”
Parental consent was obtained, and Grace and Jimmy were married at City Hall. They had a honeymoon of one night at an inexpensive hotel on the outskirts of downtown. But Janie Lucas had spoken too soon. On Sunday afternoon Grace and Jimmy each returned to their own parents’ apartments and resumed their lives as high school students. Grace managed to conceal her pregnancy through May, but word spread all over the school when, by her fifth month, in June, she could no longer conceal her growing belly as she changed for gym. Her parents spoke to the principal, showed Grace and Jimmy’s marriage certificate, and asked that she be allowed to stay on a few more weeks and graduate with her class.
Grace and Jimmy each continued to live at home through July, when a cheap one-bedroom apartment was located nearby and furnished from thrift shops and stores that sold cheap balsa-wood furniture.
Teenage pregnancy among high school students in the inner cities had not yet risen to epidemic proportions back in 1975, but at the time Grace became pregnant, out-of-wedlock births were something that happened mostly to older girls, girls who’d already finished high school and who held jobs, no matter how menial, or who attended college. Occasionally some twelve-year-old shocked everyone by sprouting a big belly, but Grace, coming from a poor but moral family, caused a major scandal when she “got in trouble,” as the neighbors called it.
She hated the pitying looks in the eyes of her neighbors. They’d all heard her mother brag about how she would have her pick of colleges and how she would go on to great things. Grace knew they’d all written off any future she might have, saying privately that she’d become just another welfare mother.
Fortunately, Grace never stopped believing in the bright future her parents assured her was still within her reach. She regarded her pregnancy as a temporary setback, but she always knew she would go to college one day. She wasn’t about to give up her scholarship money, and she’d already met the requirement of a high school diploma. She found a reliable babysitter to leave Shavonne with, and that January she started taking classes during the day, and worked two nights a week and all day Saturday and Sunday at the customer service desk at a local supermarket. Jimmy had gotten a job in receiving at Marshall Field’s. Most days they saw each other only long enough to say hello and good-bye as he came home and she went out to work.
The sex that turned them into teenage parents wasn’t even as fun anymore. And Grace swallowed a birth control pill every day without fail. God forbid she have another baby. This way she was protected from another pregnancy—which would be particularly troublesome, given her affair with a fellow student in her accounting class. She already had her hands full with Shavonne without having paternity issues for a new baby.
She and Jimmy quickly learned that sex is no basis to spend a lifetime together and spent five years barreling toward the inevitable breakup. After their divorce a still-young Jimmy joined the army. He served twenty years, had another marriage along the way, and eventually got divorced a second time. Every now and again he visited Chicago.
After his mother’s health began to fail, he started showing up more frequently. On one of those visits he called Grace. With her second divorce behind her and with no other plans for the evening, Grace invited him over for dinner, and they ended up in bed together for a single night of passion with no strings.
When Jimmy’s mother died three years ago, Grace was going through one of her frequent dry spells in her love life and knew she wouldn’t turn down any overtures Jimmy might make. But she was in for a rude surprise. Now retired from the service and with a good state-government position in Austin, Texas, Jimmy was accompanied by a woman in her midthirties with a pregnancy-swollen abdomen, whom he introduced as his new wife. Even Shavonne hadn’t known that her father, who’d had no children with his second wife, had married a third time, much less was starting a second family. Grace couldn’t fault him for his dismal matrimonial record, which equaled her own, but she thought it ridiculous that Jimmy would have a child younger than his grandson.
Now almost at Junior’s she found a parking space a block and a half away. Before leaving the car she clicked her Lo-Jack into place across the steering wheel. She walked down the street her sharp eyes taking in the crowd waiting to get in, which seemed to be mostly old-timers over forty. At least there were no kids in here. The last thing she wanted was to be hanging with people her daughter’s age.
Grace spotted Pat making rounds. Good. That meant Pat would be able to tell her if anyone worth knowing was here. Lord knew that Pat knew half the population of the South Side, and as for the other half, well, they all knew Pat.
The crowd at the oval-shaped bar in the middle of Junior’s was already two deep. Grace didn’t see Susan or Elyse anywhere, which meant they probably had a table on the other side. Surely they were here by now. She moved in that direction, stopping to greet people she recognized. When she passed Stacey Noe she nodded politely. She’d never liked Stacey, mostly because of the slutty reputation she’d had in high school. If Stacey hadn’t cozied up to Jimmy back then, Grace wouldn’t have been so anxious to sleep with him to keep him from getting it from her.
Stacey didn’t look bad, Grace thought. Still thin as a rail. She’d been blessed with a pretty face, although now it had a slightly hard edge, which even the lightening of her hair couldn’t disguise. Grace knew the hardness stemmed from years of sexual indiscretions. Rumor had it that she would fuck anything—even a cucumber. She’d heard Stacey was a caseworker for Cook County. It didn’t surprise Grace to see her there alone. No self-respecting man who knew her reputation would marry her. Grace found Stacey’s presence at Junior’s disheartening. She didn’t want to be around a bunch of lowlifes.
Grace was still trying to get past the crowd at the bar when she felt a tap on her shoulder. “Well, hello there.”
“Hello,” she said cautiously, praying that when she turned she wouldn’t see some man with a mouthful of gold teeth leering at her.
She turned, and she held her breath. Something about the good-looking, fair-skinned, mustached man struck her as familiar. Hell. Maybe she’d seen him in a movie. He was fine enough to be a star, especially now that Denzel had started to look a lot less gorgeous and more like just another man in his fifties. “Do I know you?”
He smiled, revealing even, white teeth. Her interest only increased. She couldn’t get excited about a man who’d clearly gone too long without seeing a dentist.
“Eric Wade. From Building Twelve.”
Grace searched her memory bank. That name sounded so familiar. Dreiser had twenty buildings, each with three stories, with five apartments to a floor. That made for a heck of a lot of people to recall.
Then it
came to her. A larger-than-usual family—and many families in the projects had six or seven children—who moved in when she was in junior high. She believed they had at least ten kids. Nice-looking kids they were, too, all of them. Grace, Elyse, and Pat all had a crush on the oldest boy, Arthur, who was sixteen and didn’t give any of them the time of day. Susan was the only one who didn’t participate. She said Arthur Wade was full of himself.
All the Wade kids had gotten their good looks from their parents, but unfortunately both the mother and the father abused alcohol to the point where Mrs. Wade had become blowsy and Mr. Wade thin and wasted. The oldest child was a girl, who got married right out of high school and had never been seen again. Grace remembered her mother saying the poor thing had probably run for her life. One of Grace’s younger brothers played with one of the Wade boys, and one day after he went to the family’s apartment he came home and declared it a pigpen, with roaches running everywhere like they were listed on the lease as occupants.
Wait a minute. Didn’t her brother play with this man who stood smiling at her now? Could that be possible? He’d been such a kid, maybe nine or ten years old at the most.
“Aren’t you Craig Corrigan’s sister?” he asked.
“Uh, yes, I am. I think I remember you, too.”
“Craig and I used to be best buddies back in the day,” he said.
His eyes openly roamed over her body, an action that to Grace could be handled either deftly, in a suave manner, or in a way that made her feel like a side of beef on a hook to be inspected. Eric Wade fell into the latter category, and even though his facial expression told her he liked what he saw, it made a warning bell go off in her head.
“You gonna be here for a while?” he asked.
“I just got here, so I guess so.”
“Yo, Eric. Whassup?”
“Hey! I was lookin’ for you, man.” Eric started to step away, then looked over his shoulder. “Can I catch up with you later, Grace?”
“Sure.” She shrugged easily and moved on.
Gradually she made her way to the back room. A few folks were dancing in the empty space in the room’s center. Elyse caught her eye and waved to her from the table for four where she sat with Susan.
Susan looked old with all that gray in her hair, Grace thought. But Elyse looked fantastic, even with the extra weight. Hell, she could afford to carry some extra pounds. She had a husband at home, and a good one, even if he’d lost some juice. Franklin Reavis had been a handsome, fit dude of about thirty-five when Elyse married him, and the few times Grace had seen him since, he’d looked pretty good. But from the way Elyse complained about his lack of drive, she imagined him now as a big fat dude lounging in a La-Z-Boy and calling out to Elyse to bring him another beer. Grace wondered if Elyse had had the foresight when she married him to think ahead thirty years, or if his turning into an old stick-in-the-mud was more than she had bargained for.
After Grace joined her friends, she began to feel better about coming down here. She might get something out of it, something named Eric Wade. That little kid she remembered from nearly thirty years ago couldn’t be called that, any more than she could. So what if he was a little younger? She could hardly be accused of robbing the cradle.
Besides, she hadn’t had sex in months, and she was raring to go. It was time for a harmless diversion, and Eric looked like he’d fill that bill just fine.
Grace and her friends were exchanging the names of people they recognized in the bar when she saw Susan’s expression change to one of distress. “Susan, you all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Over there,” Susan hissed. “He just came in. It’s Charles Valentine.”
Chapter 11
Susan’s throat felt dry; it actually hurt to speak. She’d allowed herself to entertain how she’d react if she saw Charles tonight after such a long time, seeing it as a harmless fantasy rather than as a reality. She never really thought there was any chance that he might actually show up. . . .
Elyse’s sharp whisper stopped Susan’s reverie. “Susan! Stop staring at him!”
“He’s sure to notice you soon enough,” Grace said. “Or some big-mouth who remembers what happened with him and Douglas—and this place is full of them tonight—is sure to fill him in, and he’ll start looking for you.”
“All I need now is for Douglas to come waltzing in,” Susan lamented. “We can pick up right where we left off twenty-five years ago, only in a different place, and with a bigger audience.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Grace said. “Douglas is in jail.”
Susan’s lower lip dropped. “Again?”
“They got him on a DUI.”
“How’d you know, Grace?” Elyse asked.
“Pat’s an ADA, remember? She told me they gave him a year.”
Susan didn’t know what to say, but she had a mental picture of Ann Valentine’s murderous expression when she looked at her this afternoon. Douglas ruined his life with his substance abuse. For Ann to blame her was so unfair. She’d paid a price, too. She’d had to give up Charles, whom she’d deeply loved, and head for an uncertain future, a future that took her years to find and now looked as dismal as the inside of a medicine cabinet.
Of the two brothers, Charles had actually been the better partner for her. When she was very young she thought she loved Douglas, but now she knew that that had been mere puppy love compared to her feelings for Charles. But she didn’t see how they could possibly be happy together with the shadow of Douglas’s anger hanging over them, plus the disapproval of their mother. Susan knew she’d made the right choice in refusing to marry Charles. Even her current unhappiness with Bruce didn’t make her waver.
Elyse was asking a question. “All those legal troubles have to have a hefty price tag. Was Mrs. Valentine able to hold on to the house Douglas bought her?”
Douglas had bought his parents a modest home in Hyde Park after signing with the NBA. Many folks expressed surprise that he hadn’t bought them a mansion up in Kenilworth or some other pricey suburb, but others understood that Douglas was on the lower end of the NBA pay scale.
“As far as I know she still lives in it. The rumor I heard was that he paid cash for it, so it had no mortgage.”
“I’m so nervous,” Susan said. “God. I wasn’t this nervous when I went into labor with Quentin.”
Grace gave her a dubious stare. “Now, that’s nervous. I was scared to death to give birth. Of course, it didn’t help that I was just eighteen.”
“I think he knows you’re here, Susan,” Elyse said. “It looks like he’s looking for somebody.”
“Oh my God, here he comes.” Susan practically hyperventilated as she said the words. She felt mesmerized as she watched his tall frame come around the bar, losing him momentarily every few steps as he disappeared behind this group or that. At six two, Charles did not have the exceptionally tall height of his younger brother, but he did stand tall enough to allow her to wear heels when they went out together, so she didn’t have to worry about towering over him. Susan’s adult height of five feet ten put her head and shoulders above most women.
He rounded the corner, and she felt the years melt away. She hadn’t laid eyes on Charles Valentine in nearly half a lifetime. Normally it would be a typical bittersweet reunion of two lives that under different circumstances might have been intertwined but instead went down different paths. But she was at a vulnerable stage in her life. Not only was she living with a disease that could kill her, but she’d been rejected by her own husband because of it at a time when she needed him the most. If she had any sense she would grab her purse and make a run for her car. But I’m riding with Elyse, and my car is parked in her driveway up in Lake Forest. Running down Cottage Grove Avenue will only bring the police.
In the end she just sat transfixed, watching him get closer and closer. Moisture returned to her mouth, and she stood to greet him. It turned out she had no need for words. He held out his arms, and sh
e walked into them. For a few moments they simply stood, her palms pressing into his back and his arms encircling her shoulders, their cheeks pressed against each other, oblivious to the curious stares and arm poking of most of the patrons of the bar. Then they each took a step backward to look at each other.
“You look great,” he said. “I like you with your hair short.”
She self-consciously fingered the short curls. “Thanks.”
Charles turned his attention to the others at the table. “Looking good, Grace,” he said with the ease of someone who’s seen a person in the not-too-distant past. His eyes settled on Elyse and registered surprise. “Elyse Hughes? Girl, is that you?”
Elyse stood up, and Susan tactfully stepped back to allow her to give Charles a quick hug. Charles beamed down at the five- feet-four Elyse. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You, too.”
“Join us, Charles,” Grace suggested.
Because Susan had slid in the booth next to Elyse, Charles sat next to Grace. Grace felt that the way they sat benefited her. The four of them talked animatedly, and to anyone—specifically Eric Wade—who didn’t know the past history and wasn’t close enough to see the fondness in Charles’s eyes when he looked at Susan, who sat across from him, he or she might think Charles had sat next to her because he was interested in her. The way she saw it, it could only help if Eric thought he had a little competition. She’d seen him chatting with Stacey Noe at the bar, and although her interest in Eric didn’t extend beyond the carnal, it bothered her just the same.
A little while later when Eric sidled over to her while Charles and Susan were dancing, Grace suspected he’d been watching and waiting for Charles to get up. He asked her to dance.
Once Upon a Project Page 7
